Signal Fire
by silken sandpaper
Summary: ...only there was no one to show. Jess at Christmas time. Future!Lit. AU. In progress.


**Author's Note:** I haven't written anything for this site...in a _while_. But tonight I was bored and I had Jess bouncing around in my head and I feel like writing about our favorite year-round Scrooge for the holidays. I'm thinking that this will be a story with justa few parts, maybe three or four more. It's just...Jess around the Holdays...and, you know, because I'm obssessive, there's a ninety percent chance he'll end up bumping into Rory and he'll be a happy Scrooge. D The chapters will be relatively short, I think. I've never written Jess before, so I hope I didn't rip him apart too bad. If I didn't, well, then, after I finish this, I might try a more angst filled Lit. I'm usually better at that.

**Disclaimer:** If I owned Gilmore girls, things would have gone a hell of a lot differently.

* * *

Jess hated Christmas. Full-blown, tear-your-eyes-out hatred for the holiday which always seemed to last the entire damn month. If the disgusting commerciality of it wasn't bothering him, then it was probably the fact he always managed to get himself roped into some stupid family dinner with more stupid people that he didn't care to spend five minutes with, let alone a day. 

This year; he was hoping for neither and dreading the possibility of both.

He'd gone to his mother's last year, and the year before that had been…Jimmy's place. Oddly enough, he'd preferred California. ( He hated snow. ) Besides, there was something heart-warming about waking up on Christmas morning and finding a little girl in your closet as some sort of make-shift present. Better gift than he'd ever received from his mother.

He slipped a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and slouched further into the leather couch, tossing his legs up onto the wooden coffee table ( He'd broken the glass one. ) and tugging a solitary smoke out of the container. Stupid fucking holiday. It was already pissing him off and it was still a little while away. Not that it mattered. Now that he was back in New York, he began to remember how Christmas always came around earlier here. The store displays, the Santa Claus imposters with fake beards and real beer-guts swinging around their little bells for money they didn't deserve.

God, he really hated this time of year.

Lighting the cigarette, he took a long pull and glared in the general direction of the too-large window and his too-empty, too-cold city apartment. He supposed he should be at least a little pleased with himself. A second book written, beating the shit out of all the others on it's way to the top of the best seller list and clinging on for dear life to it's spot as number two. Living on his own in a place that could actually pass an inspection and not be quarantined for housing several airborne diseases and possibly giving birth to some new, undiscovered ones in the process. Money wasn't a thing he had to worry about--not now. He had it made, he'd showed them all, hadn't he?

Only there was no one to show.

The people whose opinions mattered to him in the slightest always had this disturbingly sick tendency to believe in him even when he was a chain-smoking, gnome-stealing, ungrateful son of a bitch. The people who had never approved were not the people he cared to impress. So what the hell did all this matter? He had a nice place, he had a lot of money, his name was no longer associated with complete and total failure...and he was still a bitter piece of shit.

The author glared down at the cancer stick in his hand and sunk even further down into the couch, eyeing the remote from a distance. The television was cranking out some ridiculous tune ( When the hell had he gone to MTV? ) and it was mutilating his ears to the point of insanity. He should probably just get out of here, do something.

"Dude, I found the greatest stuff today!"

Jess rolled his eyes at Matt's entrance, wondering for the thousandth time why he'd insisted that all his Truncheon friends stay with him in New York. He'd forgotten the reason five seconds after he'd offhandedly suggested it and Matt had tackled him to the wall in what Jess considered to be more of a torture trap than a hug. ( He'd asked because the apartment in the city was too large, too lonely even for him; the master of solitaire. It was something he'd erased from his memory the second he'd acknowledged it. Jess Mariano did not get lonely. )

"Huh." Matthew proceeded to dispose of all his finding on the coffee table, some of his 'treasures' bouncing off Jess' feet and hitting the carpeted floor soundlessly. Jess glared at him ineffectively. ( Sometimes, he thought Matt was Lorelai Gilmore's long lost son--minus the selfishness and hypocritical nature but heavy on the blind optimism. )

Matt grinned and held up a…Jesus Christ.

"What the fuck are you doing with that?"

Holding up the object as if surveying it, Matt beamed down at him. "It's so cool." If possible, Jess looked more annoyed. "…yeah, cool, like the name Cedar Bar Redux, right?" Matt frowned as if deflated, but brightened moments later and waved his hand at his darker counterpart. "It wasn't that bad, Scrooge…now where do you think I should put this?"

Jess straightened. "Matt, there's no way that piece of crap is staying in this apartment."

Matt held the object closed to Jess' face and wiggled it slightly. "What has he ever done to you, man?" He glanced between Matt and the offending object, his face seemingly indifferent. "Keep taunting me with it and I'm going to shot-put you and your little treasure chests of Christmas cheer out my window farther than Randy Barnes ever could."

Uncaring of the danger he was in, Matt situated his finding directly above the television, hit the off button on the black box depicting some ridiculous brunette wailing about love songs and groped the back of the object until he grinned and flipped a little switch. Matt took a few steps back and put his hands on his hips in a triumphant stance. Jess winced.

"_Frosty the Snowman was a jolly, happy soul; with a corn cob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal…"_

There was a stark white, probably overpriced, Santa Claus hat wearing, broom-wielding plush snowman sitting on top of his television singing to him. His dark stare shifted from the offending plush icicle to Matt, who was preoccupied with grinning stupidly at the singing abomination. "I hate you."

Matt grinned, mocking his friend's disposition. "Bah, humbug." Jess scowled. "Eat me, Tiny Tim."

…It was only December 12th.


End file.
